A Book of American Martyrs(99)
But at this time, when the effect of the powerful pill seemed to have worn off, and an agitation of the nerves had not yet set in, Edna Mae spoke to her older daughter with passion. Her eyes were clear and alert and focused upon Dawn’s face in a way so fierce that Dawn felt pride in Mawmaw, that she had not felt in some time. And Mawmaw was smiling in a kind of triumph. Dawn had no actual idea what Mawmaw’s words meant but she recognized them from the Bible, the words of Jesus on the cross crying out to His Father in heaven, or from one of Reverend Dennis’s sermons, and understood that the meaning was good news, rejoicing and not lamentation.
This day you shall be with me in Paradise.
THE CHRISTIAN GIRL
Trust Jesus. If Jesus abides in your heart, you can do no evil. And no evil will be done unto you.”
This was told to her. Visiting Daddy in the detention facility and the chaplain there who was a retired Baptist minister and a former missionary in the dark continent of Africa (he said proudly) said these words which were familiar to her though she could not have recollected them herself—she had not a “way with words” as others did. But she understood the chaplain, and understood by the quiet in her daddy’s face, that was a tired face, yet a calm face, a face that had passed beyond the fretfulness of ordinary people, this was the bond between them, and among all of the Dunphys, that would abide forever.
(BUT—WAS IT TRUE? When she was alone, and sad-feeling, she could not remember the consoling words of the adults. Could she trust Jesus?)
SHE TOLD NO ONE, she’d begun to be afraid. For there was doubt in her heart, that she could trust Jesus.
It was like on TV, she’d used to see at a neighbor girl’s house (for Mawmaw and Daddy did not allow the small-screen TV in their house to be turned to such programs), you heard people speaking in a normal-seeming way but then came music, scary music, that the TV people did not seem to hear, that should have warned them that something was wrong, and something very bad would happen in another few minutes. So scary you could hardly bear it, but wanted to press your hands over your eyes.
For consider: Jesus had urged her daddy to shoot the baby killers with his shotgun but now (it seemed) Jesus had abandoned Daddy in the Broome County Men’s Detention Center where they could visit him for just one hour once a week on Saturdays. And if something went wrong and the facility was “in lockdown” they could not visit Daddy even then but were turned away at the front entrance by smirking guards.
Just one visit to the ugly detention facility on a hill above the Mad River looking like one of the old shut-down textile mills and you understood that Jesus was nowhere near such a crummy place! Only just prisoners, guards who couldn’t get decent jobs elsewhere, and sad-faced visitors thrown together as in a smelly anteroom of Hell.
Crummy was a new word Luke used often in this new place where they’d had to come to live. What Luke said Dawn was likely to pick up like those little thistle thorns that catch on your clothes, then catch everywhere.
Shitty was another word. But it was a bad word.
The Dunphy children pleaded with their mother: when was Daddy going to come back to live with them?
Except not Luke. Luke who was the oldest did not plead with Edna Mae or with anyone. In silence Luke listened to whatever faltering words their distraught mother said to placate them but the expression on Luke’s face of profound sadness and rage suggested that he did not believe a word poor Mawmaw said.
“Daddy will be home soon. There will be a trial—and then Daddy will come home.” Edna Mae paused, lightly panting. She smiled and her damp eyes moved in their sockets with halfhearted levity. “It’s a secret just now but Reverend Dennis is saying the Governor can ‘commute’ the sentence—if there is one. The Governor is a strong Christian believer in Right-to-Life.”
More than once over a period of months and eventually over a year following their father’s arrest Edna Mae would utter these thrilled words in more or less the same way evoking the Governor of the State of Ohio; and Dawn would crease her young forehead into a deep-ribbed frown asking, “And then—what? Daddy will come home?”
“Daddy will come home.”
“But what does ‘commute’ mean, Mawmaw?”
Commute. It was a strange word you would never hear except possibly on TV, or in a courtroom. Commute.
“It means what it says! The Governor has the power to bring Daddy home even if there’s a trial. No matter how the trial turns out.”
Edna Mae was exasperated. The subject was closed.
And yet, Edna Mae’s words hovered in the air. For there was something fearful in these words which the children did not want to consider—the thought that, in this new crowded place where they’d moved to stay with Edna Mae’s aunt Mary Kay Mack in her one-story shingleboard house on the outskirts of Mad River Junction, there was no room for a man of Daddy’s size.
There was no room for a man at all.
“WHY DO THEY DO THAT?”—it made her angry for some reason, possibly it was a joke, some stupid joke of boys, like when the boys at school waggled their tongues in their mouths in-out, in-out and burst into monkey laughter the girls did their best to ignore.
“Do what?”
“That.”
Angrily she pointed overhead. In Mad River Junction in her aunt’s neighborhood on a stupid steep hill she stared upward at the offensive sight in the power lines: frayed old sneakers attached by their laces, flung over the power lines and dangling like disembodied feet.